Katherine Banwell

Producer

Year started with KUOW: 2014

Katherine started working at KUOW in February 2014 as the audio engineer for the afternoon news magazine. Currently she's the producer for the Race and Equity team.

Prior to coming to KUOW, she worked at KPLU ("the other public radio station in the city") as a fill-in host on All Things Considered and host of Weekend Morning Edition. She's also the voice of many telephone on-hold messages for businesses across the country.

Originally from Canada, she began her broadcasting career as a news and arts reporter for, among other places, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Poor, neglected, carrying around a broom as substitute for the guitar he didn't have. These are images of Jimi Hendrix growing up in Seattle.

And Hendrix biographer Charles R. Cross says that even when Hendrix returned to the city as a superstar to play a concert 50 years ago, on Feb. 12, 1968, he was heckled by students at his old high school. Cross says Hendrix always had a complicated relationship with Seattle, but the city should use this anniversary to do more to honor him.

After a white police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, there were months of protest across the country, including Seattle. New attention focused on how the police interact with black people.

Now, police departments are considering whether special training can help their officers overcome their own biases.

But a recent study out of the University of Washington found that for Asian Americans, being fat correlates with being viewed as belonging in the U.S. Dr. Sapna Cheryan is a psychology professor at the UW. She talked to Kim Malcolm about the study's results.

When 30-year-old Charleena Lyles was shot and killed by Seattle Police, her death became part of a legacy of trauma absorbed by the black community. Brain scientists are only now researching impacts this kind of violence has on the psyche of African-Americans and their involvement in the criminal justice system.

Kendra Roberson, a lecturer at the University of Washington School of Social Work, provides therapy services for black school-age girls. She told reporter Patricia Murphy that young people experiencing long-term trauma can begin to believe that bad things will happen to them.

Charleena Lyles lived in housing owned and operated by Solid Ground in Seattle's Magnuson Park. The nonprofit organization manages a campus with 175 housing units for people who have come through the experience of being homeless. Mike Buchman is the communications director at Solid Ground. He told Kim Malcolm that a neighborhood has been created at Sand Point for hundreds of people.

The African American community in Seattle is in shock after city police shot and killed 30-year-old Charleena Lyles. Jenny Henderson is a therapist in Seattle whose clientele is mostly black. She tells Kim Malcolm that Lyles' mental illness was not taken into account.

Chief Sealth International High School in West Seattle is among the most diverse schools in the city. Seventy-five percent of the students are black, Latino, Asian or Native. But a lot of its students of color felt that the teachers tended to pay more attention to the white kids.

La TaSha Levy is an assistant professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. Patricia Murphy talks to her about the intersection between Black Lives Matter and the Black Panther Party and how the two movements have more in common that we may realize.

If you're a kid of color living in poverty in our region, getting to college can be tough. The Road Map Project has been trying to help for seven years. Its goal was, by 2020, to double the rate at which students in South Seattle and South King County finish college.

But with growth changing the region so quickly, people at the project reassessed that time frame. The new goal: Raise the college graduation rate to 70 percent by the year 2030.

Recent hate crimes prompted President Donald Trump to condemn such acts in a speech to Congress. Some of those incidents have been in the Pacific Northwest, and now the shooting of a Sikh man in Kent is being investigated as a possible federal civil rights violation.

UW history professor James Gregory told KUOW's Kim Malcolm about the prevalence of hate crimes in the Pacific Northwest.

Kim Malcolm talks with Holly Schindler, University of Washington assistant professor of education, about her study of low income dads of color. She wants to help them understand how they can more actively support their young children.

When Tyrone Beason called his father after Donald Trump was elected, the conversation didn’t start in the turmoil of the present.

“He started to talk about segregation, those ugly times in his formative years that shaped his understanding not only of what it was to be black but what it was to be white,” Beason told KUOW’s Jamala Henderson.